


META: The cult of Heaven, the silence of God and several surprising implications

by falsepremise



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Cult, Gen, God (Good Omens) - Freeform, Heaven, Hell, Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-07-08 21:44:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19876549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falsepremise/pseuds/falsepremise
Summary: This meta begins by asking one simple question: Is Heaven a cult? After answering that question, the implications of the answer will be explored: implications for Hell, God, Aziraphale and Crowley. And whoa are there implications.





	META: The cult of Heaven, the silence of God and several surprising implications

This meta begins by asking one simple question: Is Heaven a cult? After answering that question, the implications of the answer will be explored: implications for Hell, God, Aziraphale and Crowley. And whoa are there implications.

My understanding of cults is grounded in the work of Steven Hassan, a leading cult expert and former cult member. His website is here: https://freedomofmind.com/ and I strongly recommend reading his books if you are interested in understanding cults. 

According to Steven Hassan, cults are distinguished not by being strange or pseudo-religious but by their use of **mind control techniques or undue influence**. Thus, cults include the strange pseudo-religious type groups we tend to think of, but they also include human trafficking activities, political cults, and terrorist groups. Even abusive relationships can be understood as tiny cults because abusive relationships are all about undue influence. 

Influence exists on a spectrum, with healthy influence characterised by free will, authentic individual selves, unconditional love, empowering individuals, trust, means creating the end, and encouraging of growth. Undue influence, on the other hand is characterised by obedience, a false (cult) identity, conditional “love”, secretive or deceptive behaviour, ends justifying means, and the preserving of the cult’s power over individual growth. 

**Is Heaven a cult?**

Already the parallels between cults and Heaven in Good Omens are clear:   
• Heaven requires absolute obedience. This is tested in dramatic ways: the flood, the crucifixion, and the final war.   
• Aziraphale is in a constant struggle between his own authentic self (a compassionate angel who deeply enjoys the world and loves Crowley) and his cult self (a “good” angel who does as he is told and will fight in the final battle and Heaven will win and it’ll all be lovely).   
• Heaven only loves Aziraphale if he obeys. In fact, they are very happy to utterly destroy him when he rebels. Talk about conditional!  
• Heaven is keeping plenty of secrets. So many it is hard to get a clear grasp on what, exactly, is truly going on. Angels can possess humans. Yet, that is obviously not common knowledge, Aziraphale must reason it out. There are secret communications between Heaven (the very highest in Heaven, in fact) and Hell. Even the Great Plan is a secret, it is “ineffable”. And where exactly is God in all this? Who is in communication with her really and what are her actual wishes in all this?  
• Heaven is very definite on the ends justifying the means. Again: the flood, the crucifixion and the final war are all perfect examples. Instead of doing good, and trusting that good will come of it, Heaven chooses a “good” result and demands all manner of evil actions to get there.   
• Heaven is utterly disinterested in Aziraphale’s growth as an individual. His growth is deliberately squashed so that Heaven’s power can be maintained. When he grows anyway, Heaven takes steps to eliminate him. 

Within cults, undue influence takes many forms. No one cult will show all forms of undue influence. But the more undue influence present, the more that group is further towards the cult end of the spectrum. 

Steven Hassan breaks down the types of undue influence in his BITE model:  
• Behaviour control  
• Information control  
• Thought control  
• Emotional control 

Heaven shows all four types of undue influence:

Behaviour control  
• Obedience is promoted.  
• Behaviour modified with rewards and punishments, from the big stuff like the fall to “you don’t want to get Gabriel mad at you” and punishing Aziraphale for too many “frivolous miracles”.  
• Control over eating and drinking, with open disapproval of Aziraphale’s eating at all.  
• Enjoyment of the world is restricted. Angels don’t dance.

Information control  
• Secretive and deceptive behaviour including secret communications between Heaven and Hell.   
• Forbidding contact with ex-members and critics, i.e. demons  
• Insider vs outsider doctrine, i.e. angels vs demons  
• Using information given against you. Aziraphale is always wary of sharing his knowledge with the Archangels. Why? Because he knows it will be used against him and, indeed, it is. The moment he shares his true thoughts, and the possibility that Warlock is not the antichrist, they use this to begin to build a case against him.

Thought control  
• Black vs white, good vs evil thinking is Heaven in a nutshell and Aziraphale is not immune. Even after thousands of years of friendship with Crowley he still comes out with their black vs white propaganda.   
• Changing your identity, even your name. This is an interesting one, because of course all the members are born into the cult of Heaven not recruited. They are given their cult identity from the outset. But during the fall, it is clear that the fallen were stripped of their old identities and forcibly given new ones.   
• Using loaded language and clichés to stop complex thought. You see Aziraphale come out with this stuff multiple times: “I’m an angel, you are a demon”, “we are on opposite sides”, I am a great deal holier than thou”. Again and again, he starts thinking in a more complex accurate and nuanced way and then a loaded cliché jumps into his head and shuts that down. This is a classic sign of thought control.  
• Rejection of critical thinking and doubt. We know that Crowley fell for questioning.   
• Allowing only positive thoughts. There’s certainly only positive thoughts allowed about Armageddon, even though there’s clearly much that’s down right awful about it as Crowley points out.

Emotional control  
• Instil fear of questioning or leaving the group. Well, casting out some of the angels into the pits of Hell and making them demons surely did this! Aziraphale is certainly afraid of losing Heaven’s approval.   
• Labelling some emotions as evil or sinful. Taking pleasure in the world, e.g. eating or dancing certainly seems to be considered “sinful”.   
• Promoting feelings of guilt, shame and unworthiness. In little and big ways Heaven is shown to be constantly chipping away at Aziraphale’s sense of worth.   
• Shun you if you disobey or disbelieve. Again the fall is the most dramatic version of this imaginable.  
• Teach that there’s no happiness or peace outside the group. Again, outside Heaven, for angels, is literally Hell. That’s the choice. Yet, as Crowley says, being damned “isn’t so bad once you get used to it”. Crowley is a living example that moments of happiness are possible for fallen angels. 

**So, if Heaven is a cult, what is Hell?**

Hell is leaning towards the undue influence side of the spectrum too. Again, there’s obedience, secretive behaviour, manipulation and a lack of care about any individual’s growth. Like Aziraphale, Crowley also has an authentic self and a cult self. Hell seems to be much lighter on some aspects of behaviour, thought and emotional control (i.e. okay with enjoyment of the world, sinful behaviour, questioning), but more severe with punishment if actual disobedience to orders is discovered. Both Aziraphale and Crowley are concerned that if their Arrangement is discovered Hell will destroy Crowley (of course, both Heaven and Hell attempt to destroy them in fact but it seems they expected more leniency from Heaven). One aspect of control that is very much present from Hell is their tendency to use technology to communicate in an unpredictable way and time. There’s a threat of constant surveillance to this, or the constant possibility of surveillance that would be unnerving. In any case, Hell appears to care less about what its demons think or do in their spare time as long as they actually fall into line when given direct commands. 

We already know how Hell came to be: Lucifer led a rebellion against Heaven. Lucifer, anyone who fought on the side of the rebellion, and anyone else Heaven decided to exclude were cast out into Hell, giving new cult identities and a “new” cult to follow. 

Cults don’t just recruit followers and keep them trapped in a web of mind-control. They also punish followers who disobey. They also dump followers altogether when they become a liability. A cult member may become a liability because they are starting to break their programming, starting to question the cult, or they may become a liability because they are sick, old or mentally ill (cults like strong, fit members to do their work, they don’t like looking after their people). Alternatively, a cult member may become a liability to the current cult leader if they are gaining in power and could potentially take over the cult.

I propose that the Heaven cult decided that a purge of its ranks, creating Hell, was the best way to deal with three problems at once: (1) the rise of Lucifer and his followers threatening the leadership, (2) individuals like Crowley who were questioning and hence dangerous to keep around and (3) angels who weren’t fit enough to handle the work to Heaven’s high standards. In a sense, Hell is a break-away from the original cult of Heaven (this does happen). In another sense, it is Heaven’s dumping ground (again, this does happen). Due to the continued secretive communications between Heaven and Hell, I suspect that there was, behind closed doors, somewhat of a deal. That is, Lucifer agreed to stand down, for his own slice of power: leadership of Hell. Of course, part of Hell’s dynamic is that it has to have the pretence of being freer than Heaven. And so it does. It is lighter on some forms of control. Yet, it is also a group of deeply traumatised individuals most of whom have not even begun to actually break their programming from Heaven. So, yeah, the lighter control plus a lot of unprocessed trauma plus the lingering effects of a lifetime of mind control is also a lovely breeding ground for a whole lot of nastiness, which creates yet more trauma. Whereas Heaven is tightly controlled from above, Hell allows a degree of every demon for himself group nastiness to rule. Conveniently, that keeps it being exactly the kind of frightening unpleasant place Heaven wants it to be. And at the end of the day, it still isn’t entirely free. It is still a cult. Not only that, but a cult that remains explicitly tied to Heaven, in a sense continuing to play out Heaven’s game, continuing to obey the Great Plan. 

**Who is the cult leader?**

Although God narrates Good Omens (the show at least not the book) she’s noticeably absent from the actual story, and utterly silent when she’s appealed to by both Aziraphale and Crowley. Who do we see actually wielding power in Heaven? The Archangels, with Gabriel particularly powerful. Who does answer Aziraphale when he asks to speak to God? The Metatron. The Metatron says that speaking to him is the same as speaking directly to God. This is something very suspiciously like what a cult-leader would say. In fact, blurring the boundary between God and the cult-leader is a common characteristic of cults. 

Based on who actually wields power in Heaven I’m going to suggest that the cult leader is the Metatron surrounded by his little posse of Archangels, with Gabriel in particular a very powerful second in command. I think Metatron is the great leader, the “voice of God” and Gabriel is the one doing much if the actual running of Heaven. God is not in charge of Heaven. After all, no-one ever sees her, or hears from her directly. 

**So, wait, where is God?**

Where, indeed? Why doesn’t she answer anyone? What does she want? What is her plan? The single most remarkable characteristic of God in Good Omens is her silence. She isn’t just not communicating with humans, she isn’t communicating with angels either. That’s made very clear. As Crowley puts it “there’s just God moving in mysterious ways and not talking to any of us”. The only thing that stands in contrast to this general picture of silence is the fact that everyone seems to know that she loves The Sound of Music (I’ll come back to that). 

Why doesn’t she talk to her angels? Why doesn’t she answer Aziraphale? If things are as Heaven says they are, that is, if the angels are following God’s Great Plan and God is testing humans, allowing them to choose between good and evil this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Sure, she mightn’t communicate directly with humans to ensure she doesn’t influence the results of her experiment but why stop communicating with angels? If she’s testing humans and angels and demons are helping her to do it then she should be in communication with them regularly, just as a scientist might communicate with their lab assistants. If it wasn’t for the fact that God narrates Good Omens I’d suspect her of being dead. But she does narrate (the show at least). So she must still exist, must be watching it all unfold and deliberately refraining from doing anything or saying anything to anyone, even her angels. Why? 

God tells us at the beginning that it is a game. She says “I play an ineffable game of my own devising. For everyone else it is like playing poker in a pitch dark room for infinite stakes with a dealer who won’t tell you the rules and who smiles all the time.” Notice that she says what the game is like “for everyone else…” not for humans but **for everyone else** , angels and demons included. For them too it is ineffable. And they also have never been told the actual rules. Therefore, what they think the rules are, are not the rules at all. 

We don’t see God directly intervene at all in Good Omens, not even when begged to do so. Rather, she seems to have carefully set up the game, the experiment, got all the initial conditions just right, and then become a silent observer, watching it all play out. Actually, not purely a silent observer because she does narrate. She isn’t talking to any of the players and certainly not telling them the actual rules. But she is observing and making sense of what she is seeing, narrating it, and recording it like a scientist collecting data.

Again, she cannot be the true cult leader of Heaven because we never see her actually leading it or even simply communicating with her angels. Therefore, once she got the initial conditions of her game, her experiment set up, she must have handed over the leadership of the Heaven cult to the angels themselves, specifically to the Metatron and the Archangels. I suspect she handed over power and changed to a silent observer right back in the Beginning. Which means that everything that Heaven has done since the beginning hasn’t been the actions of God at all. It has been the actions of the cult of Heaven. Makes sense: drowning everyone, the crucifixion, Armageddon and other biblical events not shown in the show certainly show the hallmarks of cult thinking and behaviour, for example black and white reasoning and the ends justifying the means. Perhaps, even the creation of Hell wasn’t her decision. Maybe she let Metatron and the Archangels figure out how to deal with Lucifer themselves while she was busy creating humans. Or maybe the creation of Hell was all part of getting the initial conditions as she wanted them.

Back to the Sound of Music anomaly for a moment. How can we make sense of this? There’s three potential explanations: (1) it is the Metatron to loves the Sound of Music and has said so as the “voice of God”, (2) God truly does love the Sound of Music and did communicate that at some point because that information doesn’t affect the game (and she fangirls it that hard) or (3) God said she loves the Sound of Music way back at the beginning as she knew it would exist even back then. Personally, I favour (1) but whatever the solution, it is one little anomaly in a pattern of silence. 

Here’s the real crux of it: everyone is a player in her game, not just humans. She isn’t just testing humans. She is testing the angels and demons as well. They just don’t know it. She didn’t tell them that bit. After all, if she isn’t testing them why did she go silent on them? Why not stay in communication with them? If they are the research assistants in some huge experiment on humans shouldn’t she be in contact with them? The silence indicates that they are part of the experiment too.

We know God created two kinds of beings with full personhood (self-awareness, capacity for moral reasoning, language etc): angels and humans. Why give angels personhood if they aren’t part of the experiment? In fact, why create them at all? Let’s think through again the initial conditions she set up for her experiment. Angels she gave remarkable powers. But she also ensnared them in a web of mind control and undue influence. Humans she made much weaker and short living. Much less powerful. But she gave us free will. Now she’s just watching it all play out as a silent observer, letting her tests run until the experiment reaches its final end. Which is, what exactly? What is she testing? 

We can’t know for sure but we can guess at her ultimate end game because Crowley does (and of all the characters I trust his insight and judgement most of all): a war between Heaven/Hell and humanity. And if that’s the end point of the experiment, if that’s what will allow her to reach her final conclusion, then what she’s testing must be this: how powerful is freedom? That is, can relatively powerless beings with the ability to freely think and act, in time, manage to build themselves into such a powerful force that they can take on beings of near absolute power and win? That’s the experiment. It isn’t about good and evil. It is about freedom and control.

**Where does any of this leave Aziraphale and Crowley?**

Both Aziraphale and Crowley have cult-identities and authentic selves. But they are in very different places.

Crowley began to question even as an angel in Heaven and throughout the show he questions freely. He is a free-thinker. Although we see that he has a cult-identity “Crowley-the-demon” (and all that implies) I don’t think he is confused by who he really is. We don’t see the same kind of struggle between his cult identity and his authentic self as we do with Aziraphale. Instead, Crowley’s cult identity is a mask he chooses to wear to avoid detection and to survive. Interestingly, he changes his name from Crawley to Crowley. This represents, I think, his choosing of his own authentic self, while continuing to acknowledge that he remains situated within the cult. 

Crowley consistently trusts his own judgement born from his own reasoning and experience. For example, he thinks it is wrong to kill children. Not because anyone told him it was wrong but because he came to that conclusion himself. And he still thinks it is wrong even if Heaven does it and he still won’t do it himself even if he is supposed to do evil as a demon. More than that, he doesn’t doubt his own judgement of this, he doesn’t think that others might know better. He trusts himself. 

Crowley consistently moves towards his own goals. He’s playing his own game from the start or from very early on at least, even before he saw Aziraphale as on the same side. It is hard to say why Crowley started to question. We don’t know enough about his time in Heaven. But his experience of falling seems to have only crystallized his ability to reason for himself, his trust in his own judgement and his distrust in the word of Heaven or Hell. It seems to have only confirmed for him that he was right to question. It is quite possible that Crowley would have enacted some kind of complete escape before Armageddon, like leaving for Alpha Centauri, if not for Aziraphale. 

Aziraphale, on the other hand, is a true cult member for most of Good Omens. He experiences genuine struggle between his cult-identity and his authentic self and repeatedly lapses into repeating propaganda, shutting down his remarkable intelligence. You can see the switches and the struggle between his cult-identity and his authentic self moment by moment.

Yet, his authentic self is strong and present from the beginning. His act of giving away his flaming sword was an authentic one. The growth of his authentic self is supported by his time on Earth, both in terms of the distance from Heaven and his experiencing of the wider world, as well as his relationship with Crowley. 

Crowley follows all the best advice in supporting Aziraphale’s slow break from Heaven: he supports and nurtures Aziraphale’s authentic self and he shares information from beyond the cult but is careful not to be so confronting that Aziraphale will cut contact with him. In a very real way, he isn’t trying to make Aziraphale reject Heaven. He is trying to support him in thinking for himself, support him in his own growth. He doesn’t need Aziraphale to think the same as him. Just to think. That’s the key. 

When we see them at the very end, they have both escaped the cult of Heaven (and Hell). They are their own side. Like many ex-cult members Aziraphale hasn’t lost his faith in God. I suspect he will find his own new understanding of God and spirituality. In fact, I suspect that Crowley’s comment about whether God planned it all like this from the beginning was Crowley deliberately supporting Aziraphale in finding a way to still follow God without following Heaven. He’s that insightful and supportive. 

Aziraphale still has some work to do to fully break the power of Heaven’s mind control on him. Just leaving a cult is the first step. Recovery takes years. He is bound to come out with old propaganda and thought stopping clichés every so often. But Crowley is just the demon to support him through it. Which isn’t to say that Crowley doesn’t have a fair degree of recovery ahead of him too. His ability to maintain freedom of thought and contact with his authentic self in spite of continued contact with the cult is quite remarkable. But he has trauma and lingering mind control to heal from. And Aziraphale is perfectly placed to support him. 

Importantly, when the final battle between Heaven/Hell and humanity comes, I think Aziraphale and Crowley will fight on our side. The ultimate test is freedom vs control. And they’ve both chosen freedom over control.

**Author's Note:**

> Please share your thoughts! I'd love to hear them and to have the opportunity to refine this meta with feedback.


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